* Software: OK to resell if license allows it, if original is destroyed, if no copies are kept, blah blah blah. (Very complicated.) Not legal to rent software since around the mid-80s, when software rental stores stopped. ... -- rental of videos is allowed. (Why videos but not CDs? What about books on tape? What about books on CD, either audio or CD-ROM?)
Another weird twist in this topic is the "distinction" that is made between video games for consoles and the same games for computers. It is legal to rent a PSX title such as Tomb Raider but the same title ported to the PC is not legal to rent. I read about this a few years ago in an article by Trip Hawkins, CEO of 3DO, so maybe this information is out of date. But I have not yet seen CD-ROMs for rent or even available to check out for home use from the public library. I think this distinction is sometimes confused because a publisher can choose to allow a CD-ROM title to be rentable but has to explicitly sanction that. But a publisher of game console CD's cannot prevent its products from being rented. Steve Bryan Vendorsystems International email: sbryan@vendorsystems.com icq: 5263678 pgp fingerprint: D758 183C 8B79 B28E 6D4C 2653 E476 82E6 DA7C 9AC5